We were soaking in the pool when Granny returned from the store, and she was not the least happy about it.

We should have been tending to the chores.

The strawberries needed weeding, and the buckets of feathers from the relentless passing of the chicken trucks should have been picked up by now.

But it wasn't so much that we'd chosen the pool over the chores.

It was that we didn't have a pool to begin with.

To our way of thinking, that was a problem that my cousin Brian and I aimed to fix.

The memory of how it ended is crystal clear - it's hard to forget how my Granny, in her younger years, could make you feel both loved and terrified at the same time.

How it started is a little fuzzier, though I imagine it went something like this:

Brian: It's hot.

Me: Too hot!

Brian: These strawberries will taste just as good with the weeds growing!!

Me: Maybe even better!!!

Brian: Leaving the weeds would practically be a favor to Granny!!!!

Me: Yeah! Let's not weed them, but we'll put some extra Sevin Dust on them. And then let's build a pool in the garden!!!!!

This was back when Sevin Dust, Roundup, and Ammonium Nitrate weren't poisonous, so we dug our bare hands in the big sacks, dusted everything real good, and set to work on our pool.

Which is to say we dug a big-ass hole in the corner of Granny's strawberry patch.

Lined it with trash bags to keep things tidy.

Ran the hose pipe over from the well to fill it.

And there we sat when she arrived home from the self-pack grocery store in town where, at the time, you had to either bring your bags or pay $0.03 for each of theirs you needed.

Granny, of course, brought her bags. Frugal, I'm sure, is her middle name.

Anyway, there Brian and I were, soaking in the new swimming pool and solving the rest of the problems on Granny's little farm.

"Do the cows need some Sevin Dust?" I wondered aloud.

"Yup. Chickens, too," he replied.

If we'd expected Granny to be proud of our little pool in the garden, we may as well have expected the grandstand for the following year's summer Olympics to rise from the corn patch.

Come to think of it, in retrospect, we probably had a better chance of the grandstand than for Granny to have been pleased with the 5' x 5' x 2' deep mud hole we'd dug next to her prized strawberries.

So after she hosed us off, we spent the rest of the day filling the mud puddle with the same dirt we'd just dug, our dream of a luxurious swimming pool gone before it ever really started.

Granny said it was a good lesson in planning.

"You can't just rush in and do something without thinking it through, and that's why you boys are soaking in a mud pit full of fertilizer and not a swimming pool."

I reckon she was right.

But for a brief moment on a hot summer day, my cousin and I were living like kings.

Fertilizer, Sevin Dust, and all.